Crime Immemorial

In the UK in 2010, the bizarre death of a brilliant but intensely private individual would eventually spawn rumors of covert assassination by either the British secret service or a shady foreign power.

Gareth Williams, a highly intelligent, Welsh-born mathematician, began working for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham in 2001, not long after receiving his PhD from the University of Manchester. The GCHQ—a security and intelligence agency concerned with cryptanalysis, biometrics, and linguistics, among many other things—is associated with the SIS, or Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6.

In his personal life, Gareth seemed the type of person who liked to keep himself to himself, enjoying long bike rides and the slower pace of the countryside, and generally averse to a more boisterous social life. In fact, it was later reported that prior to his mysterious death, he had been working in London on an SIS project whose objective was to penetrate American and British hacking networks, and had actually requested to return to GCHQ, as he disliked the somewhat laddish culture of the SIS and wanted to go back to his quiet and solitary life in the country.

Gareth was still in London in August of 2010, however, and his superiors had become concerned when they realized they hadn’t had any contact with him for an entire week. Police were summoned to his top-floor flat in Pimlico on the 23rd to do a welfare check, and what they found was a strange and sinister puzzle that has yet to be solved.

Inside the flat, the heat had been turned up to its maximum setting, and the air was heavy with a foul and telltale stench. In the bathroom, officers discovered a red duffel bag lying in the bottom of the tub, its zipper held in place with a padlock. Upon forcing open the bag, investigators came across the nude and decomposing remains of Gareth Williams, curled into a fetal position. A key to the padlock was found underneath the body.

There was no sign of forced entry into the flat, Gareth did not appear to have struggled and bore no trace of injury, and oddly, there were no fingerprints found on the tub, the duffel bag, or the padlock. No trace of alcohol or drugs was found in his system. Forensic evidence suggested that Gareth had been dead for approximately seven days before his remains were discovered.

Shortly after the start of the investigation, authorities met with representatives of MI6 to discuss how they would handle the inquiry going forward, given the top secret nature of Gareth’s work, which at this point also involved the FBI and the US National Security Agency. It was imperative that details about his work didn’t leak to the public as the investigation progressed.

A few months after Gareth’s death, Metropolitan Police released information that the victim was known to visit bondage websites, and owned upwards of twenty-thousand pounds worth of high-end women’s clothing and shoes. It seemed as though the authorities were attempting to paint Gareth as some type of sexual “deviant,” perhaps leading the public to draw the conclusion that he had locked himself into the duffel bag and died accidentally in the course of some sexual misadventure. It later came to light, though, that Gareth’s visits to these sites were very sporadic and didn’t really indicate an active interest.

Also bolstering the police’s “deviant” narrative, though, was the testimony of his landlady, who claimed that three years prior, she had answered a scream for help from Gareth’s flat, and found him alone but tied to his bedposts with rope. He explained that he had simply been trying to see if he could escape, but had obviously been unsuccessful.

In light of this, detectives began leaning toward the theory that Gareth had actually locked himself into the duffel bag, and died after being unable to free himself, although it should be noted that the death was still classified as suspicious. There were in fact many investigators who found the accidental death scenario highly unlikely; while they admitted it was theoretically possible for Gareth to have lowered himself into the bag and locked it without leaving any fingerprints anywhere in the vicinity, it was extremely improbable, and further, a pair of experts attempted just such a feat hundreds of times, and were unable to replicate it.

It also seemed unusual that no fingerprints at all were discovered in the bathroom, and some began to speculate that the scene had possibly been wiped clean by a killer or killers. The fact that the heat had been turned all the way up in the flat could have also suggested that someone had wanted the body to decompose more quickly, perhaps to make the pinpointing of the time of death more difficult.

If Gareth was murdered, police hypothesized, he appeared to have been forced into the bag, or incapacitated somehow and then placed inside. Due to the difficulty of maneuvering a corpse into a fetal position inside a duffel bag, it was assumed that Gareth had entered the bag while still alive.

The only persons of interest at the time were a young Mediterranean-looking couple who were spotted on CCTV cameras going into the communal entrance of Gareth’s building at around the estimated time of death. However, it was later determined that these two individuals were not involved.

The coroner, Fiona Wilcox, felt strongly that Gareth had been murdered, but conceded there was insufficient evidence to officially state this outright. The outcome of the Metropolitan Police investigation was more definitive, but they concluded that Gareth’s death had been accidental, and that he had passed away alone in his flat after sealing himself inside the bag, either as a sexual game or an attempt at a Houdini-style escape gone wrong.

In 2015, an ex-KGB agent named Boris Karpichkov who was living in Britain told the media that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service had actually assassinated Gareth Williams, after they failed to blackmail him into becoming a double agent. Karpichkov claimed that the killers had injected a fast-acting and untraceable poison behind Gareth’s ear. It’s unclear how much evidence exists to support this theory, and authorities have apparently not commented on the allegations.

Because of the nature of Gareth’s work with MI6, rumors have long swirled that the man was murdered by representatives of his own government or those of a foreign power, and some have even floated the idea that the stories about the bondage websites and women’s clothing were deliberately disseminated in order to muddy the waters and strengthen the accidental death narrative.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the gruesome and peculiar death of Gareth Williams remains unsolved, and his family are still waiting for closure and justice in the perplexing case.